The #HomePerformance Hashtag: Use It

Posted by Macie Melendez on July 25, 2013

If you’re anything like me, you thought at one point that you could completely ignore hashtags (any word or phrase preceded by the # symbol). When they were introduced to Twitter in 2010, I remember thinking, Those aren’t going to catch on. That’s so confusing!

Don’t worry; it’s not the only trend I’ve been wrong about. (Honestly, what is the deal with juicing?)

Since Twitter’s introduction of hashtags, they’ve seriously caught on—most recently showing up on Facebook’s News Feed. Now Facebook allows you to search items based on trending hashtags that help identify topics that you’re interested in. While the idea behind hashtags is a good one—grouping together like ideas from a number of sources—it’s one that requires some level of commitment. The popularity of a particular hashtag relies on the number of people that know about it and that use it.

To use an example explained on a recent Energy Circle blog, some of the most popular hashtags for the home performance industry are #energy, #insulation, and #energyefficiency. So, if you want to post something to Facebook or Twitter that’s about your business and you want other people who aren’t directly linked to you (meaning they are your “friend” or “follower”) to see it, you could use one of those hashtags so that your post gets picked up in a mass feed on those subjects. But this is where the commitment part comes in: you have to continually use hashtags to get noticed. Using the #energy hashtag once and showing up in a feed with thousands of others won’t give you a huge boost in business. But if you’re an expert in the field, you provide people with useful information, and you continually include #energy in your posts, then you’ve really got something.

As noted above, #homeperformance isn’t one of the most popular hashtags in our industry, but the Energy Circle blog makes the point that it should be. Blog author Will says, “We believe that this hesitance is part of the reason for our industry's heretofore failure to break into the mainstream. If we can't even commit to using the term, how is the average homeowner supposed to hear about it?”

And I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I think this is a big problem in the home performance industry. If we don’t know how to brand ourselves, we’ll never be a brand. If we’re never a brand, we’ll never make enough money to sustain the industry. (This reminds me of an article we ran in 2011, “Branding Our Industry—The Need for Consensus.”)

So this is a request to all you home performance pros who use social media for your businesses: let’s rally around the #homeperformance hashtag! Use it on Twitter, use it on Facebook, use it on Pinterest, use it on Instagram, use it in your marketing materials. The more we can get our industry’s name out into the mainstream, the better.

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